EIGHTEENTH CENTURY HISTORY EXHIBIT
Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (Penguin, 2023)
[Extracts from Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2]
For much of his life, Hume had held that the great achievement of eighteenth-century Britain was that its religious institutions — those ‘systems of superstition’ — resembled ‘little more but in Name their Predecessors, who flourished during the civil Wars; & who were the Authors of such Disorder’. …
… What mattered most to Hume during this time was that Europe had finally escaped the bloody sectarian conflicts of the past two hundred years and found itself instead experiencing an enlightenment composed of peace, toleration and moderation. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the splitting of the church saw the rise of rival attempts to achieve the ecclesiastical and political dominance over populations that in turn heralded religious persecution and wars both within and between states. Attempts to contain this religiously fuelled violence gave rise to various political and constitutional settlements, but ordinary Europeans still faced sustained periods during which fanatics justified actions and laws condoning and encouraging civil and international bloodshed. These movements often justified themselves and generated zealous followers by defining their mission along explicitly war-like terms against those with an alternative faith. The results were often the collapse of pacific modes of behaviour and crisis among communities suddenly overrun by men and women with extreme and uncompromising beliefs. ….
… Identifying threats that might transform superstition into fanaticism was, Hume argued, a central duty of the philosopher. … He portrayed himself then as an advocate of this enlightened attitude, a hard-won spirit of the age that ought to be maintained. He believed he was a defender of the relative harmony he perceived around him, that he was honing tools for society that would help it understand the consequences of its violent past and make clear the measures that could be taken to avoid the return of those dark days.
But, over time, Hume’s position changed. … he had concluded that new forms of superstition had forged new fanaticisms of unparalleled power. Hume believed that this superstition stemmed not from the religious realm, but from that of secular belief. … He worried especially about one consequence of the pursuit of empire, namely an addiction to the idea of liberty among the populace and politicians.
And although he had defended the pursuit of luxury during his life, towards its end he was concerned that the selfishness accompanying the pursuit of material gain had corroded national mores. With these …forces in mind, Hume soon came to the conclusion that the times of the Reformation had been returned to. As they had done then, individuals would pursue extreme ends … once again peace and toleration were being replaced by division, accusation and violence. When such action became social norm, the Enlightenment — defined, in Hume’s view, by its aim to prevent superstition-fuelled conflict – had failed. …
… According to its advocates, the Enlightenment ended. Strategies for enlightenment had largely vanquished religious fanaticism from public life. But in the final decades of the eighteenth century, they believed that they ultimately failed in the maintenance of toleration and peace among nations. They braced themselves for an era of civil or international war, the growth of intolerance and the fall of existing constitutions and governments. For many, including Hume … the most significant failure was in suppressing ideological zealots whose forebears were deemed to have been responsible for the religious wars that devastated Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were right: these conflicts broke out again at the end of the eighteenth century, this time in secular guise — but with equally violent results.
Some have argued that fears for the future were a commonplace response to the French Revolution. Enlightenment thinkers had much earlier identified the problems likely to cause the age’s end. The French Revolution was, in fact, more of a response to the anticipations of imminent crisis; it was their effect rather than their cause. The view became widespread in the 1760s that new forms of fanaticism were abroad. As societies across Europe became polarized, frightening forms of superstition and enthusiasm were being translated from religion into politics. These terms — superstition, enthusiasm and fanaticism — were employed by contemporaries to signify a person for whom reason was being overwhelmed by passion, delusion or ignorance, and they are of fundamental importance in understanding the eighteenth century. They were employed again and again by a wide variety of thinkers, just as they had been across Reformation Europe, to identify those who had begun to justify civil violence against others, those who argued for war and empire-building and those who promoted forms of selfishness and luxury that were said to corrupt human nature and lead to unnatural forms of living. As a result of such diagnoses of contemporary ills, catastrophic futures were prophesied by numerous philosophers who looked on in anxiety as secular prophets promised their followers incredible social transformation and improvement.
In order to understand the Enlightenment era and its demise it is vital to distinguish between Hume’s optimism about what can be termed the enlightenment in his early life and a conversion after the Seven Years’ War to the view that enlightenment had failed. Hume’s view was that for a variety of reasons existing societies were in crisis, being likely to collapse or be consumed in violence, and the only certainty was that the politics and society that surrounded him could not be expected to survive into the future. This was a view shared by many. As a result, speculation was rife about alternative futures, often highly practical in nature, focusing not just on the desired end but also the means of getting there, the transition mechanism that would successfully move humanity from a state of violence or corruption to harmony – or at least stability. Many of these anticipated futures could be described as enthusiastic, being overly optimistic and impractical, but easily attracting adherents in consequence of promises being made to potential believers and because of the attractiveness of a general message of hope.
The rhetorically gifted projector who sold such moonshine was derided but also feared as the ‘man of system’, Smith’s term from The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1755). The man of system might be a popular prophet and demagogue who manipulated the people, seeing himself to have special access to truth, or a philosopher advocating rigid laws and policies promising utopia, refusing to adapt to circumstances. Such men existed in the realms of religion, politics and scholarship. The sort of enthusiasm these schemers might conjure was recognized as being a step on the road to fanaticism, hence Hume’s acute concern about the likelihood of civil and international war and all the kinds of intolerance and savagery that would accompany it. …
… Hume’s world was one where people were expected to adhere to a faith because religion guaranteed promises and oaths, the very foundation of social interaction. Atheism was beyond the pale, and atheists social outcasts. …
… People living in the eighteenth century tended to see themselves as postwar generations. Their parents and grandparents would have had first- or second-hand experience of worldly turbulence traceable to the Reformation. Religious warfare, often bound up with long-burning dynastic conflicts, had devastated Europe from at least the 1520s.
David Hume and the End of the World
… Regarding religious fanaticism, Hume made his optimism clear in the twelfth essay, entitled ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, of the book that made him famous in 1741, the Essays, Moral and Political. Here he defined superstition as false or corrupt belief, being the product of blindly following a madman or being foolishly convinced of the truth of opinions that went against reason. Superstition was produced by human weakness, fear, melancholy and ignorance, forces which caused people to accept as true things that were manifestly false. He argued that the forced oppression of individuals, by direct terror or the apprehension of threat, fostered an environment in which superstition thrived. Superstition might lead easily to enthusiasm, when the delusions fed to an individual were embraced to an extent that they wanted to promote them evangelically. Enthusiasm was a situation in which ‘the imagination swells with great but confused conceptions.’ When the imagination was let loose people began to believe things far beyond the normal because their minds were frequently overcome with ‘raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy’.
Despite the ludicrous nature of enthusiastic belief, enthusiasts tended to be fearless, certain that they were carrying out the will of God. The individual who experienced the movement from superstition to enthusiasm was likely, Hume argued, to perceive themselves to be both elevated as a person and a particular favourite of the divinity, and it was therefore no surprise that enthusiasm inspired by superstition often resulted in violence. Examples included the Anabaptists of the 1520s in Germany, the Levellers in England in the 1640s, the Covenanters in Scotland in the 1660s and the Camisard rebels in France in 1703. All of these movements were characterized by a ‘contempt for the common rules of reason, morality, and prudence’.
In his 1741 analysis of such delusions of the human mind, Hume was most concerned by what he termed the ‘most cruel disorders’ produced by enthusiasm. At the same time, he identified a positive consequence. It was the case that enthusiastic fury and fanaticism was always short-lived, like its natural parallel of thunder and lightning, and always exhausted itself, leaving all the wildness spent and the air calmer and more serene than before the storm. There was a natural process, Hume said, by which ‘dangerous bigots’ became ‘very free reasoners’. …
… Hume drew lessons from the English experience of the Reformation and its consequences. He believed that the religious radicalism that had flourished during the civil wars of the seventeenth century had been worth it, because the violence of the radical Puritans, once their force had become exhausted, then led to the foundation of a free state with a moderate and pacific public culture.
Hume made the same point in his History of England, stating that ‘the precious spark of liberty had been kindled, and was preserved, by the Puritans alone; and it was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous and habits so ridiculous, that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution.’ …
… The towering achievement of his age was, in Hume’s opinion, the neutering of evangelical religion and the drawing from it of a passion for liberty. For Hume, always sensitive to the operation of unintended consequences in history, part of the reason for this success had been the extent of the seventeenth century bloodletting and the grotesque results of the civil war. However, he nevertheless believed that the barriers erected between religion and politics in the seventeenth century to secure toleration were important in preventing the violence and massacre so prevalent in prior centuries. Hume remained an enemy of superstition, which he continued to associate with established religious authority grown too powerful in society. …
A discussion of the book may be found here:
The End of Enlightenment: A Conversation with Richard Whatmore, 19 December 2023
Richard Bourke: The book ends with a constructive vision of the vocation of history in which the past is viewed as a potential source of instruction rather than an object of blanket condemnation. I think of this as a defence of the discipline against pervasive moralism in research. Is this a fair assessment of your underlying approach?
Richard Whatmore: I’m running out of words, so the short answer is yes, that is a very good way of putting it. I think that if you study ideas in action, and the way they fail or succeed, you can learn a lot. And you tend not to moralise because there are never easy solutions to problems. …
Coming up soonish..
A critique of the concept of ‘The Enlightenment’ by J. C. D. Clark (2024).
Quentin Skinner (2023) on ‘Political Philosophy and the Uses of History’ —
The conclusion they drew is that it is possible to live as a free person, and at the same time as the subject of a state, if and only if you live in what they liked to describe as a free state. You need to live, that is, as a member of a body politic in which — as with the individual body of a free person — the body is moved exclusively by its own will, which in the case of a body politic can only mean the will of the people as a whole.
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